The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, finds that people often underestimate how much another person likes them after they meet for the first time.

“I always have this sneaking suspicion that maybe my conversation partner didn’t like me or enjoy my company as much as I liked them or enjoyed their company,” says Gus Cooney, a social psychologist at Harvard University who co-authored the paper with Erica Boothby, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at Cornell University. “Is it just me?” he wondered. “Or is it everybody?”

Cooney’s research suggests it’s the latter. The researchers ran a series of experiments in which two people met and talked for the first time, then rated their own conversational performance and the other person’s. Across conversations of varying lengths, some with topics provided and others without, the researchers found that people consistently rated their conversation partner as more likable and enjoyable to talk to than they rated themselves.

Shy people were especially prone to the “liking gap,” Cooney says, but it happened across personality types. There was even evidence, gathered through a study that surveyed college suitemates over an academic year, that the misperception persists beyond first interactions, potentially lasting months or more.

Since it’s impossible for both people in a conversation to be the more likable one, Cooney says this finding suggests that we treat new acquaintances more kindly than we do ourselves — and that people like us more than we think they do.

Several factors are likely driving the liking gap, Cooney says. For one thing, people may be so hyper-focused on their side of the conversation that they can’t accurately gauge how the other person is feeling. “We don’t know what other people are thinking, and so we substitute our own thoughts about ourselves for what other people think,” Cooney explains. “We’re basically projecting what we think of our own performance, and assume that’s what other people think of us.”

People tend to be harder on themselves than they are on new acquaintances.

After a conversation, you can look back on everything you said wrong and mentally correct it, or remember instances when you were funnier, kinder or more eloquent. You don’t have the same mental catalogue for someone you’ve just met, so you may “take them more at face value and be much more charitable,” Cooney says.

That’s a potential problem, since underselling yourself socially may promote sadness and anxiety, or cause you to miss out on valuable personal interactions, Cooney says. While the study didn’t look into strategies for overcoming the liking gap, Cooney says simply knowing it exists is a good place to start.

“We always have this post-mortem with ourselves. That little voice in your head turns on, and you start thinking about your conversation,” Cooney says. “Be suspicious of this voice and its accuracy.”

Another new study, published in Nature Human Behavior, supports this type of social pep talk. It found that when a person makes a positive first impression, the other person remembers it — but when an initial meeting goes poorly, the other person is ready and willing to change his mind and give him another chance.
B A M !

That research was based on a hypothetical scenario in which a stranger either electrically shocked another person for money — creating a wholly negative first impression — or turned down the cash out of concern for the other person. Study participants were willing to give even the electrical shockers a second chance at making a good impression, the researchers found — so after a normal conversation, devoid of electrical shocks, you’ll probably do just fine. . .

This Cubs Fan With Down Syndrome

Sang The National Anthem at Wrigley

And It’s Amazing

I usually get a huge lump in my throat when I hear the National Anthem. . .

followed very closely by tears in my eyes;

It just gets me

and I kind of really like being

G O T T E N. . .

but this rendition did both at the same time and a little more:

After raising more than $37,000 for Special Olympics Illinois, Cubs fan Stefan Xidas, who has Down syndrome, had his wish granted last Monday night before the Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers. In front of a crowd of roughly 38,000 fans, he finally got the chance to sing the national anthem at Wrigley Field. And it was just a touching moment for Stefan and for everyone involved.

“It’s the best moment I could ever imagine,”

Stefan said before he took the field to sing the anthem in front of the crowd.

How did Stefan get this opportunity? It started last month when his two childhood friends, Tommy Molitor and John Rosinski, helped him create a GoFundMe page to collect donations for Special Olympics Illinois.

He wrote a letter to Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts on the fundraising page, Xidas who is 30 years old wrote:

I’d like to make a deal with Tom Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs. If I’m able to raise $5,000 for the Special Olympics Organization, Tom Ricketts will let me sing the National Anthem at a Cubs game.

What an amazing moment. . .

This is not a political statement about standing/kneeling, bowing, or saluting during the National Anthem so much as it is about

1 saying ‘thank you’ 2 apologizing when wrong3 showing up on time4 being nice to strangers5 listening without interrupting6 admitting you were wrong7 following your dreams8 being a mentor9 learning and using people’s names10 holding doors open

Not bad advice, huh. . . ?

A N D. . .

it’s literally

p r i c e l e s s

because it doesn’t cost a thing. . .

no formal education or certificates necessary;

It actually becomes

BILLION DOLLAR ADVICE
when Warren Buffett tweets it out as he did a couple of weeks ago;

Does it make a difference if a no name or even I

Tell you something as opposed to the exact same advice given by a
Billionaire. . .

I will give you 1 billion reasons why it doesn’t

but the biggest one is

I F
you don’t take the advice that you know is right
for you. . .
it really won’t make much of ad i f f e r e n c e

I would rather you open up your heart
than your wallet

. . .but make no mistake
about this
even though
it may be a more costly investment. . .I T W I L L
be Everlasting. . .

IS KINDNESS A SCIENCE. . . ?

For the past three decades, Dacher Keltner has been researching human emotions, starting with micro-movements of facial muscles and more recently the relationship between powerlessness and health outcomes. Photo: Daphne White

The “science” of happiness may sound like an oxymoron to most people, but not so Dacher Keltner, psychology professor and director of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at UC Berkeley. For the past three decades, he has been researching human emotions, starting with micro-movements of facial muscles and more recently the relationship between powerlessness and health outcomes. Along the way, he has written several books and co-created one of the most popular MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the country.

Keltner began studying psychology just as the field was transitioning away from a belief that all human decisions were based on rationality and facts (the brain as computer model), and toward the “emotion revolution.” The “explosion of interest in feeling” fit in with Keltner’s own family belief system, and he quickly found his niche. “My mother, an English professor and student of Romanticism, and my father, an artist guided by Lao Tzu and Zen, cultivated in me the conviction that our best attempts at the good life are found in bursts of passion,” he writes in his book Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.

Keltner may look like a California surfer but actually comes from Scandinavian stock whose emotional makeup is more Ingmar Bergman than Beach Boys. The anxiety is not recognized or discussed in his family, but Keltner sees the pattern clearly. “People don’t realize it, but I have had a few periods in my life when I experienced exceptional degrees of anxiety and near-OCD,” he said. One of the defining characteristics of anxiety is “interior focus,” a hypersensitivity to bodily sensations such as heart palpitations, blushes, and sweating, he said. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Keltner, 55, has been on a life-long search for happiness and what he calls “the greater good.”

He started out “reading faces” as a post doc in the lab of Paul Ekman — made famous by the TV series Lie to Me— spending over 2,000 hours analyzing frame-by-frame video images of facial expressions in order to map different micro-emotions. “When I first heard about this, it was like an intellectual epiphany,” he said. It validated what he had learned about emotions, and provided a scientific way of measuring something that otherwise seemed ineffable.

Ekman claims that micro expressions cannot be hidden, even when a person is trying to conceal an emotion. By learning Ekman’s coding system, Keltner said, he entered a different “perceptual world … It’s the world before language, the way our primate predecessors communicated. Darwin was interested in this. It’s mind-blowing to be exposed to it.” While Ekman only studied six emotions at his UC San Francisco lab, Keltner eventually added another 15 emotions to the mix, including awe and compassion.

As a result of his studies, he can sometimes see things that others can’t. “I may see anxiety before a person is aware of it, or I might spot depression at an early stage,” he said. “There’s all this information in your face and voice and body. Most people pay attention to this maybe 60 percent of the time but with me, it’s maybe 70 percent. I use it with my teenage daughters,” he jokes. When it comes to his wife, though, “she doesn’t believe anything I say, just in general.”

Happiness and the Greater Good

“The connection between happiness and the greater good is pretty clear, and it’s under-appreciated,” he said. There is more to happiness than momentary, individual pleasure. “Social connection is one of the strongest determinants of health,” Keltner said. “We take a lot of happiness in giving to other people.”In fact, research shows that lonely people die younger than people with strong social networks.“Lonely college students had higher blood pressure than non-lonely ones, putting them at greater risk for heart disease, and this health disparity was even greater between lonely and non-lonely older adults,” according to an article in the Greater Good magazine.

Greater Good Science Center

GGSC was founded in 2001, with a gift from Berkeley alumni Thomas and Ruth Hornaday. After their daughter died of cancer, and soon after 9/11, the couple called Cal’s Dean of Social Sciences and said they wanted to create a center “that would really bring peace to people,” Keltner said. The dean, Geroge Breslauer, knew of Keltner’s work and referred the Hornadays to him.

When the idea for the center was first proposed, Keltner decided pretty quickly that he did not want to use the money just to write white papers and sponsor meetings. “I didn’t want to create the typical academic center,” he said. “The great thing about Berkeley is that I could say, ‘Let’s use the science of kindness and altruism and play and gratitude to promote the greater good. Let’s disseminate it to everyone, not just other academics’.”

But do these tools really work? Keltner said he practices many of them and finds that even in these bleak times, he is able to remain “60 percent optimistic.” That is a far cry from absolute happiness, of course. But then, Keltner said, most of his friends are “in despair,” especially about the political situation in the country. “Kindness is the most important thing,” he said. “That, and mindfulness.”

The Power Paradox

Much of his own work is about class, inequality, and power. Keltner’s latest book, The Power Paradox: How we Gain and Lose Influence, includes a chapter on “The Price of Powerlessness.” He writes about a part of his childhood lived in the “poor rural town” of Penryn, CA, where he discovered “the empathy, kindness, generosity, respect, and inclusiveness that the poor live by in response to the harsher material conditions of their lives.”

Returning to Penryn as an adult, Keltner discovered that most of his friend’s parents died young of a variety of diseases. His book cites research showing that a person’s social class predicts their vulnerability to disease. “With each rung down the class ladder,” he wrote, “an individual is more likely to suffer from disease and to live a shorter life, to battle hypertension, cervical, cervical cancer, and painful arthritis, and to suffer from other chronic illnesses.” Growing up poor, research shows, “shaves six years off life expectancy.”

Keltner writes about a “new science of power,” which posits that only socially intelligent, caring and compassionate people ultimately become leaders. His book revolves around 20 “Power Principles” such as “enduring power comes from empathy” and “enduring power comes from telling stories that unite,” and “groups give power to those who advance the greater good.” It is hard to connect those concepts with current reality.

Yet the “power paradox” of the book’s title is this: “we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst.” Keltner writes that people become leaders by exhibiting compassion, listening skills and other positive behaviors, but once they obtain power they tend to behave “like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.”

Keltner had originally written a longer chapter on coercive Machiavellian power for the first draft of the book, “but in the spirit of collective optimism we cut it,” he said. “If I were to write the book now, I would say that human societies are an interesting combination of coercive, manipulative, aggressive power and prosocial and connective power.” The book has been translated into 12 languages.

“There is a real hunger to foster feelings of reconciliation and compassion even at a time when people feel alienated from one another,” Marsh said. “They are eager for any information that can help develop a greater sense of empathy and forgiveness, even for people who seem different from themselves.”

Meanwhile, Keltner continues to explore practices related to the “greater good.” He volunteers at San Quentin a few times a year; works with national health care executives to incorporate GGSC practices into health care settings; and continues to teach and spend time with his family.

He also tries to spend as much time as possible outdoors, especially in places that evoke awe in him, such as the high Sierras. “Sometimes it takes a while to figure out who you are,” he said. He loves backpacking and camping and sleeping outside. “I don’t mind bears running around,” he said. Happiness, it turns out, can be found in unexpected places. . .

I hadn’t even heard the term until yesterday afternoon during a Spiritual Care Coordinators Discipline Meeting. Dr. Kevin Dieter, a hospice doctor gave a presentation about Palliative Sedation/Management of Symptoms Intervention and began with this term. . .

And then I began asking those first two questions:

DO YOU KNOW ONE?

ARE YOU ONE?

An empath is a person who has the ability to feel the emotional state of another individual. There are many different types of empaths, however, Heyoka empaths may be the most spiritually attuned of them all.

What is a H e y o k a ?

‘Heyoka’ is a Native American word meaning ‘sacred clown’ or ‘fool’. This term is apt because it describes the way Heyoka use light humorous energies to open people’s minds and to heal. They work almost by tricking or joking with people.

This kind of empath sees life differently. They understand that sometimes the only way shift people’s thinking is to startle them out of it. They do this by showing them a completely different way of looking at things, often the complete opposite way.

The healing of a Heyoka is important, but they don’t take life too seriously. Heyoka empaths also behave as a mirror, reflecting other people’s behavior back to them so others can see themselves in a new way and begin to heal.

What do Heyokas do?

In Native American ceremonies, the Heyoka’s role would be to disrupt things in order to enable people to see things differently. This kind of empaths uses the energy of the sacred clown to open people’s eyes to new possibilities and different angles on a situation. They also have the ability to shift the energy of a group through their understanding of emotions.

Modern day Heyoka Empaths will often say or do something to shift energy and change perceptions. This allows others to begin to see clearly and heal. This kind of empath doesn’t heal in a conventional way, with crystals, their hands or through spirits. Instead, they create the space for others to become more aware of how they are behaving and thus heal themselves.

Heyoka empaths often heal through chaos and disruption. This is not always an easy or peaceful healing. However, it may be necessary for those completely stuck in a way of thinking that does not serve them.

Because Heyoka are empaths, they understand the emotions of others and are, therefore, able to provide the healing method suited to the individual’s needs. They might not heal someone completely all at once, however, he or she can lead someone through the next step on their journey to wholeness.

How do you know if you are a Heyoka?

Traditional signs that you are a Heyoka include being born breech, being dyslexic, being emotionally unpredictable, doing things backwards, being left-handed and thinking differently to others.

If you can feel other people’s emotions and instinctively know what they need to heal, you may be a Heyoka. You may also notice that when you have a deep conversation with someone, they often experience life-changing insights.

Perhaps you help people to heal through humor, or point out the ridiculous nature of a situation, in which case, you are using Heyoka energy. If you often find people are surprised or shocked by what you say or do, but then come round to your way of thinking and are able to move forward in their lives, then you are most certainly a Heyoka. . .

Plenty of research has shown that dogs respond to signs of their owner’s distress, such as crying, but it hasn’t been clear to what extent pups will try to make their owners feel better. A paper published Tuesday in the journal Learning & Behavior, however, suggests that “dogs will actually take an action trying to alleviate that distress,” says Julia Meyers-Manor, an assistant professor of psychology at Ripon College in Wisconsin and a co-author of the study. The results suggest that your pooch may empathize with and care for you even more than you know.

The researchers ran an experiment with 34 dog-owner pairs from the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. The dogs were of a variety of breeds and ranged from 1.5 to 12 years old.

Each of the owners sat in a small room, closed off from his or her dog by a door. The door, which had a window that allowed dogs to see their owners, was fastened to its frame by magnets, so dogs of any size could push it open.

To test how dogs would respond to suffering, half of the owners were instructed to say the word “help” in a distressed tone of voice every 15 seconds, making crying noises in between. The other half said “help” in an emotionless tone, and hummed “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” between words. The researchers then observed how many of the dogs made an attempt to open the door to be with their owner.

Roughly half of the dogs ended up opening the door — but there was no significant difference between dogs who heard their owners crying versus humming. So does that mean dogs have no empathy?

Not necessarily. While about the same number of dogs in each group opened the door, dogs responding to owner distress did so much faster — after an average of 23 seconds, compared to almost 96 seconds in the humming group. Among dogs who did open the door, those who scored highly on a separate owner bond test, which involved measuring how much a pet gazed at its person during a frustrating situation, tended to open the door quickly, signifying that dogs who feel attached to their owners want to help.

“Some of this was that dogs want to be with their people,” Meyers-Manor says. “But they want to be with their people even quicker if the person is crying than if they’re humming.”

The findings also suggest some solace for people whose dogs did not open the door. The dogs in the crying group showed significantly more signs of distress — including pacing, panting and whining — than pooches in the control group, suggesting that they may have been too anxious or upset to complete the task. “That tells us that no one should be concerned if their dog doesn’t open the door if they’re crying,” says co-author Emily Sanford, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Johns Hopkins University. “It might be that they love you too much.”

Plus, Sanford adds, it stands to reason that dogs would show a range of personality traits, just as humans do.

“There are some people who just don’t have as strong empathy toward other people,” Sanford says. “So we are not surprised at all to find that there’s a range in other species besides our own.”

And while the study exposed some interesting new findings about canine behavior, Meyers-Manor says one thing remained constant: Each owner thought his or her pet was a very good dog.

“Immediately after we finished each person-and-dog combo, almost every one of them would sit and explain how their dog really would rescue them,” she laughs. “That happened whether they were in the control group and humming, or crying. Everyone wanted to tell us how much their dog would actually help.”

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